Menu

equality

Americans Are Wary of Being Alone With the Opposite Sex: Many men and women are wary of a range of one-on-one situations. Around a quarter think private work meetings with colleagues of the opposite sex are inappropriate. Nearly two-thirds say people should take extra caution around members of the opposite sex at work. A majority of women, and nearly half of men, say it’s unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse.

Source: Morning Consult survey of 5,282 registered voters, conducted May 2 to 5. Questions were shown in random order. The grey bar represents those who said they did not know or had no opinion.

Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives? Fewer of the youngest millennials, those aged 18 to 25, support egalitarian family arrangements than did the same age group 20 years earlier. The proportion of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s but has fallen since. In 1994, 83% of young men rejected the superiority of the male-breadwinner family. By 2014 that had fallen to 55%. Increased support for male leadership in home life among 18- to 25-year-olds may reflect an attempt to compensate for men’s loss of dominance in the work world.

GREAT DC LOVE DEBATE: 71% of D.C. residents are single, and that’s certainly not all by choice. “There seems to be a lot of great men and a lot of great women and they seem to not want to be single. And yet for some reason, there seem to be more of them than ever.”

Why are people single? Are women crazy gold-diggers and men commitment-phobic players?

Life coaches talk of how to change your at-ti-tude, live in the moment and stop treating dates as “spouse-hunting safaris.”

The D.C. dating scene is more focused on relationship status than substance: “I think people have way too many agendas and don’t know how to live life. They just want the title — married, engaged, in a relationship, somebody loves me.

Soul Mate in a Box: Or SMIAB is a person we rarely if ever meet and in some cases never speak to, but to whom we feel closer than anyone else through instant messages, emails, Skype, FaceTime and texting. Unlike hookups, these relationships are all about sharing your every thought, idea and emotional burp. But they are also, crucially, about being able to close your laptop and turn off your phone whenever you want to and continue about your life as you wish, unencumbered.
If a couple felt as if they had gotten to know each other so well online, how could that intimacy suddenly drain away? One explanation: They didn’t actually get to know each other so well. They only got to know what was served up, a two-dimensional collection of images, text and, for some, audio. When the messy parts of us aren’t on display from the beginning of a relationship — when awkwardness and fumbling and being forced to be present without a mouse-click escape hatch all enter the scene — it’s hard to catch up. As good as it felt to be able to create an ideal version of ourselves, it can feel jarringly worse to have that control suddenly yanked away. Second explanation: We often find the object that’s far away to be more enticing than the one that’s nearby.

Couple in bed (NYTIMES)

RESIGNED LOVE: Pull back on the marriage improvement program and instead join the ranks of the appreciatively resigned. They will realize that passion does not equal love, and that the loss of one doesn’t necessarily mean the loss of the other.

DESIRE v EQUALITY:The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire? If men did all “feminine chores” like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming, then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did “masculine chores”, like taking out the trash or fixing the car.